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The Life and Loves of Lena Gaunt
This is the story of Dame Lena Gaunt: musician, octogenarian, junkie.
Lena is Music’s Most Modern Musician; the first theremin player of the twentieth century.
From the obscurity of a Perth boarding school to a glittering career on the world stage, Lena Gaunt’s life will be made and torn apart by those she gives her heart to.
Through it all her relationship with music and with her extraordinary instrument – the theremin – endures, in this novel about how our lives are shaped by love, loss and the stories we tell.
Lena is Music’s Most Modern Musician; the first theremin player of the twentieth century.
From the obscurity of a Perth boarding school to a glittering career on the world stage, Lena Gaunt’s life will be made and torn apart by those she gives her heart to.
Through it all her relationship with music and with her extraordinary instrument – the theremin – endures, in this novel about how our lives are shaped by love, loss and the stories we tell.
312 pages, Paperback
First published September 1, 2013
5 people are currently reading
688 people want to read
About the author
Tracy Farr
9 books30 followersTracy Farr is a novelist and short story writer who used to be a scientist. Originally from Australia, she’s lived in New Zealand for more than twenty years; she calls both countries home.
Tracy's debut novel The Life and Loves of Lena Gaunt (Fremantle Press 2013; Aardvark Bureau 2016) is about love, loss, electronic music and the sea. Her second novel, The Hope Fault (Fremantle Press 2017, Aardvark Bureau 2018), is about family, anxiety and geology.
Tracy's debut novel The Life and Loves of Lena Gaunt (Fremantle Press 2013; Aardvark Bureau 2016) is about love, loss, electronic music and the sea. Her second novel, The Hope Fault (Fremantle Press 2017, Aardvark Bureau 2018), is about family, anxiety and geology.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 55 reviews
January 1, 2016
This is one of those introspective books, a first person narrative of a woman in her eighties , a passionate pioneer musician, still grieving in old age over the losses of loved ones . It's a sad story in so many ways but yet it celebrates the life of Lena Gaunt. Who is this Lena Gaunt? This is a novel, but what is told here and how it is told, makes you believe you are reading a true memoir .
I couldn't help but think that Lena Gaunt was a real person or at the very least she was based on a real person. In an interview on the publisher's website , the author tells us that she saw a documentary of Clara Rockmore , a renown theremin player and that Rockmore was a "starting point rather than a model " for Lena . Still I felt like she was real , a testament to the writing for sure . Even Beatrix Carmichael , the love of Lena's life is not based on any one particular artist.
The theremin is an instrument I had never hear of and I found it so intriguing that one could play an instrument without touching it . Lena too became intrigued. As a little girl everything is music to Lena and the beautiful descriptive writing has a tone of its own . Lena is a prodigy, obsessed with music from childhood. She is separated from her parents for 12 years when she is sent "home" to Australia from Singapore at 4 years old and to a boarding school . She would have led a lonely childhood but for her Uncle Valentine who fosters her love of music and is the only family she really knows .
From Singapore to Australia to Malacca to New Zealand to Paris and St. Ives and back to Australia , from 4 years old to her eighties , Lena takes us through her joys in life - her music , her Beatrix and her daughter, Grace . She takes us through the grief of loss and the passion of her music . It's a rather slow moving story and you won't find much action if that is what you are looking for , but you will find a beautifully written story of Lena Gaunt's life and loves .
Thanks to Gallic Books and NetGalley.
I couldn't help but think that Lena Gaunt was a real person or at the very least she was based on a real person. In an interview on the publisher's website , the author tells us that she saw a documentary of Clara Rockmore , a renown theremin player and that Rockmore was a "starting point rather than a model " for Lena . Still I felt like she was real , a testament to the writing for sure . Even Beatrix Carmichael , the love of Lena's life is not based on any one particular artist.
The theremin is an instrument I had never hear of and I found it so intriguing that one could play an instrument without touching it . Lena too became intrigued. As a little girl everything is music to Lena and the beautiful descriptive writing has a tone of its own . Lena is a prodigy, obsessed with music from childhood. She is separated from her parents for 12 years when she is sent "home" to Australia from Singapore at 4 years old and to a boarding school . She would have led a lonely childhood but for her Uncle Valentine who fosters her love of music and is the only family she really knows .
From Singapore to Australia to Malacca to New Zealand to Paris and St. Ives and back to Australia , from 4 years old to her eighties , Lena takes us through her joys in life - her music , her Beatrix and her daughter, Grace . She takes us through the grief of loss and the passion of her music . It's a rather slow moving story and you won't find much action if that is what you are looking for , but you will find a beautifully written story of Lena Gaunt's life and loves .
Thanks to Gallic Books and NetGalley.
February 3, 2015
“I have lived in this house, this cottage, for twenty years. I will die here. I have lived here and played my machine, pulled sound from the aether. I am electrical by nature; music invents me”
The Life and Loves of Lena Gaunt is the first novel by Australian author, Tracy Farr. After a poorly-reviewed performance on the theremin at the inaugural Transformer Festival in 1991, Dame Lena Gaunt is approached by film maker Mo Patterson who wants to produce a documentary about her life. Initially reluctant, Lena eventually agrees, but in doing so, exposes herself to memories, long buried, of the loves and losses that describe her eighty years.
Interspersed with the description of Lena’s everyday life by the beach at Cottesloe, and her interactions with Mo, are her reminiscences of an eventful life: Malacca, Perth, Sydney, Dunedin, Cottesloe and Europe, and the friends, family and the events, both joyful and tragic, that populated her existence. Farr gives the reader some beautiful descriptive prose, especially with regard to sound and music:
“Percussion sounded from the bridge as we passed under her, the pitch of the beaten, metallic tones changing as we moved in relation to the bridge. Sound bounced in every direction, both muffled and reflected, complicated by the water around us. The thrugging engines Houtman provided a steady background beat, and the sounds from the bridge sometimes fought and syncopated with the ship’s rhythm, sometimes complemented it, ran with it, helped speed us along the water” and “…….a pressure I can hear inside my head as a single note, humming, musical, low…. lower than any note I have heard before. It is the lowest note in the universe; a grace note, a ghost note, the low hum of everything connecting” are two examples.
This interesting, informative and often moving novel was long listed for the 2014 Miles Franklin Literary Award. A thoroughly enjoyable read.
The Life and Loves of Lena Gaunt is the first novel by Australian author, Tracy Farr. After a poorly-reviewed performance on the theremin at the inaugural Transformer Festival in 1991, Dame Lena Gaunt is approached by film maker Mo Patterson who wants to produce a documentary about her life. Initially reluctant, Lena eventually agrees, but in doing so, exposes herself to memories, long buried, of the loves and losses that describe her eighty years.
Interspersed with the description of Lena’s everyday life by the beach at Cottesloe, and her interactions with Mo, are her reminiscences of an eventful life: Malacca, Perth, Sydney, Dunedin, Cottesloe and Europe, and the friends, family and the events, both joyful and tragic, that populated her existence. Farr gives the reader some beautiful descriptive prose, especially with regard to sound and music:
“Percussion sounded from the bridge as we passed under her, the pitch of the beaten, metallic tones changing as we moved in relation to the bridge. Sound bounced in every direction, both muffled and reflected, complicated by the water around us. The thrugging engines Houtman provided a steady background beat, and the sounds from the bridge sometimes fought and syncopated with the ship’s rhythm, sometimes complemented it, ran with it, helped speed us along the water” and “…….a pressure I can hear inside my head as a single note, humming, musical, low…. lower than any note I have heard before. It is the lowest note in the universe; a grace note, a ghost note, the low hum of everything connecting” are two examples.
This interesting, informative and often moving novel was long listed for the 2014 Miles Franklin Literary Award. A thoroughly enjoyable read.
August 15, 2018
(4.5) Lena Gaunt: early theremin player, grande dame of electronic music, and opium addict. When we meet our 81-year-old narrator, she’s just performed at the 1991 Transformer Festival and has caught the attention of a younger acolyte who wants to come interview her at home near Perth, Australia for a documentary film – a setup that reminded me a bit of May Sarton’s Mrs. Stevens Hears the Mermaids Singing. It’s pretty jolting the first time we see Lena smoke, but as her life story unfolds it becomes clear that it’s been full of major losses, some nearly unbearable in their cruelty, so it’s no surprise that she would wish to forget.
Though Lena bridles at Mo’s many probing questions, she realizes this may be her last chance to have her say and starts typing up a record of her later years to add to a sheaf of autobiographical stories she wrote earlier in life. These are interspersed with the present action to create a vivid collage of Lena’s life: growing up with a pet monkey in Singapore, moving to New Zealand with her lover, frequenting jazz clubs in Paris, and splitting her time between teaching music in England and performing in New York City.
With perfect pitch and recall, young Lena moved easily from the piano to the cello to the theremin. I loved how Farr evokes the strangeness and energy of theremin music, and how sound waves find a metaphorical echo in the ocean’s waves – swimming is Lena’s other great passion. Life has been an overwhelming force from which she’s only wrested fleeting happiness, and there’s a quiet, melancholic dignity to her voice. This was nominated for several prizes in Australia, where Farr is from, but has been unfairly overlooked elsewhere.
Favorite lines:
“I once again wring magic from the wires by simply plucking and stroking my fingers in the aether.”
“I felt the rush of the electrical field through my body. I felt like a god. I felt like a queen. I felt like a conqueror. And I wanted to play it forever.”
“All of the stories of my life have begun and ended with the ocean.”
Originally published on my blog, Bookish Beck.
Though Lena bridles at Mo’s many probing questions, she realizes this may be her last chance to have her say and starts typing up a record of her later years to add to a sheaf of autobiographical stories she wrote earlier in life. These are interspersed with the present action to create a vivid collage of Lena’s life: growing up with a pet monkey in Singapore, moving to New Zealand with her lover, frequenting jazz clubs in Paris, and splitting her time between teaching music in England and performing in New York City.
With perfect pitch and recall, young Lena moved easily from the piano to the cello to the theremin. I loved how Farr evokes the strangeness and energy of theremin music, and how sound waves find a metaphorical echo in the ocean’s waves – swimming is Lena’s other great passion. Life has been an overwhelming force from which she’s only wrested fleeting happiness, and there’s a quiet, melancholic dignity to her voice. This was nominated for several prizes in Australia, where Farr is from, but has been unfairly overlooked elsewhere.
Favorite lines:
“I once again wring magic from the wires by simply plucking and stroking my fingers in the aether.”
“I felt the rush of the electrical field through my body. I felt like a god. I felt like a queen. I felt like a conqueror. And I wanted to play it forever.”
“All of the stories of my life have begun and ended with the ocean.”
Originally published on my blog, Bookish Beck.
November 23, 2015
A book that grows on you the longer one reads it, until it becomes unputdownable. A ficitonal account of the life of Dame Lena Gaunt, filled in with aspects of the author's won family history, the lives of prominent NZ and Australian artists of the times and the invention of a unique musical instrument that enthralls.
Lena Gaunt was an only child, born in Singapore, schooled in Australia, who became closer to her bachelor Uncle Valentine than her own parents, who were distant, not just physically, but emotionally and who died before any change in their relationship could have manifest.
Lena played the piano, but her first true love was the cello, one of her few regrets, that in taking up the theremin, the instrument she would become most well known for, she stopped playing the cello.
After an unsuccessful visit to her father in Malacca (Malaysia) at 18, one where he had hoped to groom her into the demure, music playing, after dinner entertainment for his freinds, a night walk into the seedier parts of the town, where she stumbles across her Uncle and her father's business partner in an opium den, has her sent back to Australia, willingly and to the beginning of a life she will create anew.
She is introduced to and practices cello with Madame Vita Petrova, the eccentric, vodka and coffee drinking Russian with a unique ear and skill for the cello, not found in the more conservative establishments. It is her first encounter with the artistic and musical misfits, a bohemian community with whom she is more comfortable and will become part of.
It is through Madame Petrova she hears of the Professor, the man who introduces her to the instrument, the Music's Most Modern Instrument, she will play for the world, the theremin.
In Sydney, she meets Beatrix Carmichael, a painter/artist twice her age who becomes her constant companion, a part of her.
The novel folows Len's long, engaging life, and each turn of events that takes her away from the familiar until fnally she returns to the place that most feels like home, where she plays one last perfromance and will meet the young filmaker Mo, who provokes her into finishing this story she once began to set again.
It is a fascinating story, a mix of fact and fiction, one that Tracy Farr succeeds in bringing alive through the places she lives and the people we encounter, the music that is made, the images that are painted.
Due for publication in the UK Jan 2016.
Lena Gaunt was an only child, born in Singapore, schooled in Australia, who became closer to her bachelor Uncle Valentine than her own parents, who were distant, not just physically, but emotionally and who died before any change in their relationship could have manifest.
Lena played the piano, but her first true love was the cello, one of her few regrets, that in taking up the theremin, the instrument she would become most well known for, she stopped playing the cello.
After an unsuccessful visit to her father in Malacca (Malaysia) at 18, one where he had hoped to groom her into the demure, music playing, after dinner entertainment for his freinds, a night walk into the seedier parts of the town, where she stumbles across her Uncle and her father's business partner in an opium den, has her sent back to Australia, willingly and to the beginning of a life she will create anew.
She is introduced to and practices cello with Madame Vita Petrova, the eccentric, vodka and coffee drinking Russian with a unique ear and skill for the cello, not found in the more conservative establishments. It is her first encounter with the artistic and musical misfits, a bohemian community with whom she is more comfortable and will become part of.
It is through Madame Petrova she hears of the Professor, the man who introduces her to the instrument, the Music's Most Modern Instrument, she will play for the world, the theremin.
"played by the waving of hands, like conducting an orchestra. It is played without the player touching it, not with a bow, nor by blowing. It is neither wind nor string, brass nor percussion."
In Sydney, she meets Beatrix Carmichael, a painter/artist twice her age who becomes her constant companion, a part of her.
The novel folows Len's long, engaging life, and each turn of events that takes her away from the familiar until fnally she returns to the place that most feels like home, where she plays one last perfromance and will meet the young filmaker Mo, who provokes her into finishing this story she once began to set again.
It is a fascinating story, a mix of fact and fiction, one that Tracy Farr succeeds in bringing alive through the places she lives and the people we encounter, the music that is made, the images that are painted.
Due for publication in the UK Jan 2016.
January 5, 2016
The imaginary autobiography of Lena Gaunt is a wonderful read, and a great first novel from Tracy Farr.
Told as a first person narrative it tells the life of Helena Gaunt, known as Lena Gaunt to everyone, from her early years in Malacca, Malaysia, school in Western Australia, and her return to Malacca upon the death oh her mother. It then follows her burgeoning musical career and personal life through Sydney and onto Dunedin, New Zealand, which ends with the death of one of the few people she truly loves. There are then periods in Western Australia during WWII and onto Europe, ending with a second round of “fame” in the UK and USA.
Lena’s musical career is all based upon an instrument called a Theremin, which I had never heard of, but is an actual electrical instrument developed in the 1920’s and still in use today, in a modified form – loads of information on the internet about it.
The secondary characters in the novel are interesting in their own right and include Trix, Uncle Valentine and Gus, all of who add to the narrative of the story.
Told in parallel with the main story is that of Mo, a filmmaker, who wants to make a documentary about Lena’s life. These two stories inter-wine with each other and are a good mechanism for driving the story.
The writing is gentle, lyrical and beautiful, and I loved it from the start. This is not a book solely for ladies, though I’m sure more ladies than men will read it. Anyone who does not grab a copy and read it, is missing out on a great story and a wonderful read.
I was given a free copy of this novel by the publisher in exchange for an honest review.
Told as a first person narrative it tells the life of Helena Gaunt, known as Lena Gaunt to everyone, from her early years in Malacca, Malaysia, school in Western Australia, and her return to Malacca upon the death oh her mother. It then follows her burgeoning musical career and personal life through Sydney and onto Dunedin, New Zealand, which ends with the death of one of the few people she truly loves. There are then periods in Western Australia during WWII and onto Europe, ending with a second round of “fame” in the UK and USA.
Lena’s musical career is all based upon an instrument called a Theremin, which I had never heard of, but is an actual electrical instrument developed in the 1920’s and still in use today, in a modified form – loads of information on the internet about it.
The secondary characters in the novel are interesting in their own right and include Trix, Uncle Valentine and Gus, all of who add to the narrative of the story.
Told in parallel with the main story is that of Mo, a filmmaker, who wants to make a documentary about Lena’s life. These two stories inter-wine with each other and are a good mechanism for driving the story.
The writing is gentle, lyrical and beautiful, and I loved it from the start. This is not a book solely for ladies, though I’m sure more ladies than men will read it. Anyone who does not grab a copy and read it, is missing out on a great story and a wonderful read.
I was given a free copy of this novel by the publisher in exchange for an honest review.
January 20, 2016
If you’re anything like me, you just won’t be able to help yourself: within a page or two of starting this fascinating book you’ll be Googling theramins, seduced by the magic of words into yearning to hear what they sound like. Tracy Farr’s debut novel, The Life and Loves of Lena Gaunt, invents the life of a woman who wanted to be ‘Music’s Most Modern Musician’, and who became the foremost proponent of the first electrical musical instrument – the theramin, invented by Leon Theramin in the 1920s.
On You Tube there are some excruciating examples of well-known tunes played on this bizarre instrument that is played without touch, but if you want to see and hear an example par excellence, it’s Celia Sheen’s rendition of that eerie theme for Midsomer Murders that shows what a mesmerising instrument a theramin can be:
To access the link to this YouTube performance and read the rest of my review please visit http://anzlitlovers.com/2013/10/08/th...
On You Tube there are some excruciating examples of well-known tunes played on this bizarre instrument that is played without touch, but if you want to see and hear an example par excellence, it’s Celia Sheen’s rendition of that eerie theme for Midsomer Murders that shows what a mesmerising instrument a theramin can be:
To access the link to this YouTube performance and read the rest of my review please visit http://anzlitlovers.com/2013/10/08/th...
February 3, 2014
This review is brought to you courtesy of Wild Colonial Girl blog
Tracy Farr’s debut novel The Life and Loves of Lena Gaunt featured in the October soiree of Friday Night Fictions. Dame Lena Gaunt is in her 80s. She takes gentle doses of heroin, she swings between men and women as lovers and confidantes, she moves with the times via Perth, Sydney, various parts of Asia and New Zealand, all the while dreaming of her electrified passion: the theremin.
As Lena raises her fingers and moves her body, Farr’s lyrical and elegant prose places us in the picture — an audience for memories and music — as Lena negotiates a documentary crew keen to capture a look-back at her life. The idea of documentary sets up a dynamic tension between what Lena wants to reveal, and what actually happened to her. She occasionally hides behind the persona of a vague elderly lady, all the while sorting out just who she can trust.
I’m always drawn to writers who pack an emotional punch by holding things back. Jon Bauer does it well. Jo Case and Annabel Smith too. It’s something I aim for in my writing: to not tell readers what to feel, but to hope they feel it deeply anyway.
It’s exciting to read a debut novelist as exciting as Farr, as she has a career set in writing novels. Her fiction is strong and unique. She is about to head (from Wellington in NZ) to Perth for the writers’ festival. I spoke to her about how to capture a long life in fiction.
Do you remember the moment when you decided you wanted to be a writer?
I don’t remember one moment. The ‘want’ was there from a young age. I wrote mostly songs and narrative poems when I was a kid, and I always kept journals and notebooks for scribbling and sketching. It wasn’t until I was in my late twenties that I started trying to write stories, though. Even then, I was tentative and unsure about my abilities. I was slow to come out of the author-closet and declare myself even a wanna-be writer.
What inspired you to set out on the long road to writing a novel?
There are several unfinished novels in the bottom drawer; Lena wasn’t my first attempt at writing a novel, just the first one that was worth finishing. When I first started trying to write fiction, it was writing a novel that I had in mind — or a novella, in the vein of Brenda Walker’s Crush and One More River. But I just didn’t have the staying power — I’d get ten or twenty thousand words in, even forty thousand, then hit a big wall. I pulled back; I wondered if I could somehow develop my writing muscles by writing short stories, and that seemed to work for me. The novel and short story are very different forms, but I needed to learn how to write by learning to write short stories. Once I had the idea for Lena Gaunt, I realised I could trick myself into writing that novel by thinking of it as a series of related short stories. I’ve learnt enough through the process of writing this novel that I haven’t felt the need to trick myself into the next novel in the same way.
What is it that you love most about writing?
Moving words around until they start to sing; inventing other lives; surprising myself; shutting myself away and (literally or metaphorically) curving my arm around the page to write and write and write and perfect before letting the words out to the world.
I love what comes after the writing, too; that once my novel is out in the world, what I intended as its meaning is irrelevant — it comes down to what the text says to a reader, and how the reader receives it. I love the idea that there are readings of the book that I haven’t foreseen (or consciously invited, or intended), and that it has a life beyond and without me.
What do you put off doing when you sit down at your desk?
Housework (happily). Gardening (wistfully). Socialising (guiltily). Television/DVDs (smugly). Reading (mournfully).
How did you go about getting the book published?
It was a long, long road. When I finished the first polished draft of the novel, I didn’t — I still don’t — have an agent and I knew that, without one, I needed to rely on my contacts, and/or submit it to the few publishers that will still accept unsolicited manuscripts directly from authors. Several of the publishers I fancied fell within that set, so I thought I’d give it a go without an agent.
So I sent that finished, but early, draft of the novel to a New Zealand publisher who I’d been in touch with over the years, and who’d been keen to see a novel from me. They knocked it back. I was devastated, even though I’d been pretty sure that the novel I’d written wasn’t the novel they were looking for from me, and even though I knew the novel needed more work, and wasn’t yet the best it could be. In that devastated, desolate, rejected state, I fired the MS off in a mad hurry — as it was, still needing work — to the slush pile of an Australian publisher. That rejection, when it came, hurt less. I pulled my head in, paused, took a breath.
I worked for a solid six months on a major revision, overhauled the MS, took in comments from my wonderful early readers, then sent the much-improved MS, unsolicited, to Fremantle Press. Fremantle Press was always in my sights as a natural home for the novel, particularly because the story was so strongly grounded in place, and that place was Cottesloe Beach, near where I grew up in Perth. It was nearly six months after sending them the MS that I received the news that they were keen, but thought it still needed work; would I consider working with them to revise the MS? Yes, I would. We worked back and forth for nearly eighteen months — slowly, but as fast as their schedule and mine allowed — on the MS before, in June 2012, we signed the contract to publish.
Your writing moves between Perth, Sydney, New Zealand, and various parts of Asia. How did you go about researching and recreating these very different parts of the world?
I’m originally from Perth, I lived there until I was nearly 30. I left Perth in 1991, the year the contemporary part of the novel is set, so Perth in 1991 is very real, very specific to me, sort of set in amber — a time before mobile phones and the internet, before we were all connected. When I started writing the novel I was living for a month in Perth, up in the hills at Katharine Susannah Pritchard Writers’ Centre as Writer in Residence, and I’d catch the bus and the train and the bus to Cottesloe and walk around and breathe the air, watch the light, listen to the streets, when I needed to remind myself of the setting.
I’ve spent time in most of the places the novel is set in. The sections of the novel that are set in Sydney I originally set in New York, where the theremin was actually invented in the 1920s. But I only knew New York from movies and, more importantly, I wanted to move firmly away from the ‘real’ characters — Leon Theremin, Clara Rockmore — who had inspired my characters and their story, and move them closer to what was home for Lena. It was only when I started rewriting scenes from their New York setting that I realised the gift that a move to Sydney in the timeframe of that section would give me: Sydney Harbour Bridge under construction. I layered research on Sydney in the 1920s and early 1930s with my own memories of a long summer spent in Sydney at the age of 16 (about Lena’s age when she arrives there).
I had fantastic resources to draw on for the sections of the novel set in (and travelling to) Singapore and Malacca. My paternal grandmother shares with the fictional Lena Gaunt a birth place and year (Singapore, 1910), childhood in Singapore and Malacca, and jaunts back to boarding school in Perth, and in writing Lena’s story I leaned heavily on stories my grandmother told me over the years, as well as written resources from her father, my great-grandfather. I was able to overlay their experience of South-East Asia early in the twentieth century with mine of the same places sixty or seventy years later.
In all of these very specific settings, though, I wasn’t aiming for strict historical realism. I was seeking to create a version of each time and place that was intensely believable within the context of the novel, yet was — filtered through Lena’s eyes and experiences — slightly off-true, off-kilter.
The novel shifts from historical to contemporary fiction as you trace Lena’s life. How difficult was it to structure this so it moves seamlessly?
That was one of the biggest challenges in the revision process. I wrote the contemporary sections quite separately from the historical sections, and I wrote each of those historical sections quite separately from the other historical sections. There was also a whole other part of the novel in earlier drafts — it didn’t make it in the final cut — in the voice of the filmmaker character, Mo Patterson, and stretching forward in time to the 2010s. I worked hard, through revisions, on the relative weights (in word length as well as emotional weight) of the sections, and on where and how to interleave the contemporary sections with the historical sections. I found it really interesting that in the final structural revision — a really fantastic process of tightening and fine-tuning, and the murder of a few darlings — some of the most effective changes were those that shifted a paragraph or even a whole chapter, say from the end of one section to the start of the next; it was unpicking the endpoints that were artefacts from my writing process. Working collegially with my editors was a really pleasant and unexpectedly energising part of the publishing process; I had great editors, and I always felt as if my book and I were in safe hands.
With your lyrical prose, you beautifully capture the magic of the theremin. When did you come up with the idea of Lena playing this mesmerising instrument and was the character based on an existing figure?
I’d first seen the theremin played live when I went to see the band Pere Ubu in Vancouver in the mid-90s. Mesmerising is just the word; I couldn’t take my eyes off it. It was more than ten years later that I watched the documentary Theremin: An Electronic Odyssey. The film — a history of this bizarre musical instrument and its inventor, Lev Termen (usually anglicised as Leon Theremin) — was where I encountered Clara Rockmore, the first virtuoso player of the theremin. About that time, I’d started writing notes, circling around a character I wanted to write about, a musician. I knew, when I watched that film, that I’d found Lena’s instrument — an instrument you play without touching was perfect. But I knew I didn’t want to base my character, Lena, strictly on Clara, so I more or less stopped my research then and there. Film and still images of Clara — from a young girl to an old woman — in the documentary gave me some really strong visual cues for Lena. I started with a lot of notes based on my recollection of the film, then as I developed the character, I aimed to distance myself and Lena from the film and from real life events. Clara Rockmore was a starting point for Lena, rather than a model.
Do you have a writing community where you live? Do you like the company of other writers when working on drafts, or are you someone who prefers to go it alone?
Wellington has a really strong community of writers and people who care about writing and books. We have the International Institute of Modern Letters at Victoria University, and writing courses at Whitireia and Massey University; New Zealand Book Council is based in Wellington, and we have an active local branch of the NZ Society of Authors. There’s always something happening.
That said, my tendency is to be a loner; but there are times when the input and company of others has been hugely helpful. I’ve been part of writing groups at various times, mostly arising from workshops or classes I’ve taken. Being able to sit in that classroom or living room or cafe, to swap writing, to give and take criticism and comment, is a great thing. But I do find that the more my time is squeezed and limited and precious, the more likely I am to just shut the door on everyone else and write, by myself. It’s much later in the process that I seek the company of others.
What is the most important thing you’ve learned in the process of writing your first novel, that you wish you knew at the beginning?
Be patient. The process takes a long time. Don’t rush. Find a great editor/editors, and trust her/them.
Which authors have been instrumental to your own reading and writing?
My first loves were my parents’ books from their childhoods: A.A. Milne in my dad’s precious editions from the 1940s; Enid Blyton from Mum. As a teenager, I read widely — I spent a lot of time in the school and public libraries — but developed obsessions with authors who I’d focus in on at different times: science fiction writers (Arthur C. Clarke, Asimov, John Wyndham, Ray Bradbury); the murder mysteries of Agatha Christie (after an earlier diet of Trixie Belden, Nancy Drew, Famous Five, Secret Seven et al.); an assorted bunch of American writers (J.D. Salinger, Paul Zindel, Sylvia Plath, John Steinbeck, Richard Brautigan); the short stories of Katherine Mansfield.
By the time — years later, in my late twenties — I was starting to try to work out how I might write, I was reading and inspired by Helen Garner, Beverley Farmer, Brenda Walker, Elizabeth Jolley, Peter Carey, Tim Winton; Patrick White, too. I was in love with Australian writing. I was in love with women writers: Virginia Woolf, Jeanette Winterson, Angela Carter, A.S. Byatt. I somehow didn’t discover Alice Munro and Carol Shields until I lived in Canada — they joined my pantheon. Men got a look-in too: Martin Amis, Ian McEwan, Julian Barnes, Jim Crace. Moving to New Zealand in the mid-90s, I was struck most by the poetry that runs through this country’s literature (poetry and prose) — Elizabeth Smither, Jenny Bornholdt, Bill Manhire, Sarah Quigley, Fiona Kidman, Damien Wilkins, Ian Wedde.
This is a very white, very anglo list, I know. But the writers who have influenced me most have been overwhelmingly white, writing in English from the mid- to late-twentieth century onwards.
My reading (I’ve resisted the silly urge to qualify and diminish this with ‘for pleasure’; all of my fiction reading is for pleasure) always circles back to one early obsession: murder mysteries and thrillers. I return again and again to Ian Rankin, Val McDermid, Peter Temple (a recent discovery), Ruth Rendell, P.D. James, John Le Carré, Henning Mankell; I find strange comfort in reading and re-reading Lee Child’s Jack Reacher novels. One of my early, unfinished novel MS is a murder mystery; I still fancy writing one, one day.
Your central character, Lena, lives into her 80s. How do you see yourself when you reach this age?
I look to my grandmothers. I was thinking a lot about them when I wrote this novel, and I dedicated it to them. At eighty, both of them were feisty, active, interesting, stroppy, interested, full of life and opinions. I hope I’m the same. I see myself as a kick-arse crone.
For more about Tracy Farr, or her debut novel, visit her website.
Each month I choose a debut author to profile from Friday Night Fictions. Read interviews with Michael Adams and Nina Smith. Next up is Laura Jean McKay, writer of the short story collection, Holiday in Cambodia — from the November soiree.
Tracy Farr’s debut novel The Life and Loves of Lena Gaunt featured in the October soiree of Friday Night Fictions. Dame Lena Gaunt is in her 80s. She takes gentle doses of heroin, she swings between men and women as lovers and confidantes, she moves with the times via Perth, Sydney, various parts of Asia and New Zealand, all the while dreaming of her electrified passion: the theremin.
As Lena raises her fingers and moves her body, Farr’s lyrical and elegant prose places us in the picture — an audience for memories and music — as Lena negotiates a documentary crew keen to capture a look-back at her life. The idea of documentary sets up a dynamic tension between what Lena wants to reveal, and what actually happened to her. She occasionally hides behind the persona of a vague elderly lady, all the while sorting out just who she can trust.
I’m always drawn to writers who pack an emotional punch by holding things back. Jon Bauer does it well. Jo Case and Annabel Smith too. It’s something I aim for in my writing: to not tell readers what to feel, but to hope they feel it deeply anyway.
It’s exciting to read a debut novelist as exciting as Farr, as she has a career set in writing novels. Her fiction is strong and unique. She is about to head (from Wellington in NZ) to Perth for the writers’ festival. I spoke to her about how to capture a long life in fiction.
Do you remember the moment when you decided you wanted to be a writer?
I don’t remember one moment. The ‘want’ was there from a young age. I wrote mostly songs and narrative poems when I was a kid, and I always kept journals and notebooks for scribbling and sketching. It wasn’t until I was in my late twenties that I started trying to write stories, though. Even then, I was tentative and unsure about my abilities. I was slow to come out of the author-closet and declare myself even a wanna-be writer.
What inspired you to set out on the long road to writing a novel?
There are several unfinished novels in the bottom drawer; Lena wasn’t my first attempt at writing a novel, just the first one that was worth finishing. When I first started trying to write fiction, it was writing a novel that I had in mind — or a novella, in the vein of Brenda Walker’s Crush and One More River. But I just didn’t have the staying power — I’d get ten or twenty thousand words in, even forty thousand, then hit a big wall. I pulled back; I wondered if I could somehow develop my writing muscles by writing short stories, and that seemed to work for me. The novel and short story are very different forms, but I needed to learn how to write by learning to write short stories. Once I had the idea for Lena Gaunt, I realised I could trick myself into writing that novel by thinking of it as a series of related short stories. I’ve learnt enough through the process of writing this novel that I haven’t felt the need to trick myself into the next novel in the same way.
What is it that you love most about writing?
Moving words around until they start to sing; inventing other lives; surprising myself; shutting myself away and (literally or metaphorically) curving my arm around the page to write and write and write and perfect before letting the words out to the world.
I love what comes after the writing, too; that once my novel is out in the world, what I intended as its meaning is irrelevant — it comes down to what the text says to a reader, and how the reader receives it. I love the idea that there are readings of the book that I haven’t foreseen (or consciously invited, or intended), and that it has a life beyond and without me.
What do you put off doing when you sit down at your desk?
Housework (happily). Gardening (wistfully). Socialising (guiltily). Television/DVDs (smugly). Reading (mournfully).
How did you go about getting the book published?
It was a long, long road. When I finished the first polished draft of the novel, I didn’t — I still don’t — have an agent and I knew that, without one, I needed to rely on my contacts, and/or submit it to the few publishers that will still accept unsolicited manuscripts directly from authors. Several of the publishers I fancied fell within that set, so I thought I’d give it a go without an agent.
So I sent that finished, but early, draft of the novel to a New Zealand publisher who I’d been in touch with over the years, and who’d been keen to see a novel from me. They knocked it back. I was devastated, even though I’d been pretty sure that the novel I’d written wasn’t the novel they were looking for from me, and even though I knew the novel needed more work, and wasn’t yet the best it could be. In that devastated, desolate, rejected state, I fired the MS off in a mad hurry — as it was, still needing work — to the slush pile of an Australian publisher. That rejection, when it came, hurt less. I pulled my head in, paused, took a breath.
I worked for a solid six months on a major revision, overhauled the MS, took in comments from my wonderful early readers, then sent the much-improved MS, unsolicited, to Fremantle Press. Fremantle Press was always in my sights as a natural home for the novel, particularly because the story was so strongly grounded in place, and that place was Cottesloe Beach, near where I grew up in Perth. It was nearly six months after sending them the MS that I received the news that they were keen, but thought it still needed work; would I consider working with them to revise the MS? Yes, I would. We worked back and forth for nearly eighteen months — slowly, but as fast as their schedule and mine allowed — on the MS before, in June 2012, we signed the contract to publish.
Your writing moves between Perth, Sydney, New Zealand, and various parts of Asia. How did you go about researching and recreating these very different parts of the world?
I’m originally from Perth, I lived there until I was nearly 30. I left Perth in 1991, the year the contemporary part of the novel is set, so Perth in 1991 is very real, very specific to me, sort of set in amber — a time before mobile phones and the internet, before we were all connected. When I started writing the novel I was living for a month in Perth, up in the hills at Katharine Susannah Pritchard Writers’ Centre as Writer in Residence, and I’d catch the bus and the train and the bus to Cottesloe and walk around and breathe the air, watch the light, listen to the streets, when I needed to remind myself of the setting.
I’ve spent time in most of the places the novel is set in. The sections of the novel that are set in Sydney I originally set in New York, where the theremin was actually invented in the 1920s. But I only knew New York from movies and, more importantly, I wanted to move firmly away from the ‘real’ characters — Leon Theremin, Clara Rockmore — who had inspired my characters and their story, and move them closer to what was home for Lena. It was only when I started rewriting scenes from their New York setting that I realised the gift that a move to Sydney in the timeframe of that section would give me: Sydney Harbour Bridge under construction. I layered research on Sydney in the 1920s and early 1930s with my own memories of a long summer spent in Sydney at the age of 16 (about Lena’s age when she arrives there).
I had fantastic resources to draw on for the sections of the novel set in (and travelling to) Singapore and Malacca. My paternal grandmother shares with the fictional Lena Gaunt a birth place and year (Singapore, 1910), childhood in Singapore and Malacca, and jaunts back to boarding school in Perth, and in writing Lena’s story I leaned heavily on stories my grandmother told me over the years, as well as written resources from her father, my great-grandfather. I was able to overlay their experience of South-East Asia early in the twentieth century with mine of the same places sixty or seventy years later.
In all of these very specific settings, though, I wasn’t aiming for strict historical realism. I was seeking to create a version of each time and place that was intensely believable within the context of the novel, yet was — filtered through Lena’s eyes and experiences — slightly off-true, off-kilter.
The novel shifts from historical to contemporary fiction as you trace Lena’s life. How difficult was it to structure this so it moves seamlessly?
That was one of the biggest challenges in the revision process. I wrote the contemporary sections quite separately from the historical sections, and I wrote each of those historical sections quite separately from the other historical sections. There was also a whole other part of the novel in earlier drafts — it didn’t make it in the final cut — in the voice of the filmmaker character, Mo Patterson, and stretching forward in time to the 2010s. I worked hard, through revisions, on the relative weights (in word length as well as emotional weight) of the sections, and on where and how to interleave the contemporary sections with the historical sections. I found it really interesting that in the final structural revision — a really fantastic process of tightening and fine-tuning, and the murder of a few darlings — some of the most effective changes were those that shifted a paragraph or even a whole chapter, say from the end of one section to the start of the next; it was unpicking the endpoints that were artefacts from my writing process. Working collegially with my editors was a really pleasant and unexpectedly energising part of the publishing process; I had great editors, and I always felt as if my book and I were in safe hands.
With your lyrical prose, you beautifully capture the magic of the theremin. When did you come up with the idea of Lena playing this mesmerising instrument and was the character based on an existing figure?
I’d first seen the theremin played live when I went to see the band Pere Ubu in Vancouver in the mid-90s. Mesmerising is just the word; I couldn’t take my eyes off it. It was more than ten years later that I watched the documentary Theremin: An Electronic Odyssey. The film — a history of this bizarre musical instrument and its inventor, Lev Termen (usually anglicised as Leon Theremin) — was where I encountered Clara Rockmore, the first virtuoso player of the theremin. About that time, I’d started writing notes, circling around a character I wanted to write about, a musician. I knew, when I watched that film, that I’d found Lena’s instrument — an instrument you play without touching was perfect. But I knew I didn’t want to base my character, Lena, strictly on Clara, so I more or less stopped my research then and there. Film and still images of Clara — from a young girl to an old woman — in the documentary gave me some really strong visual cues for Lena. I started with a lot of notes based on my recollection of the film, then as I developed the character, I aimed to distance myself and Lena from the film and from real life events. Clara Rockmore was a starting point for Lena, rather than a model.
Do you have a writing community where you live? Do you like the company of other writers when working on drafts, or are you someone who prefers to go it alone?
Wellington has a really strong community of writers and people who care about writing and books. We have the International Institute of Modern Letters at Victoria University, and writing courses at Whitireia and Massey University; New Zealand Book Council is based in Wellington, and we have an active local branch of the NZ Society of Authors. There’s always something happening.
That said, my tendency is to be a loner; but there are times when the input and company of others has been hugely helpful. I’ve been part of writing groups at various times, mostly arising from workshops or classes I’ve taken. Being able to sit in that classroom or living room or cafe, to swap writing, to give and take criticism and comment, is a great thing. But I do find that the more my time is squeezed and limited and precious, the more likely I am to just shut the door on everyone else and write, by myself. It’s much later in the process that I seek the company of others.
What is the most important thing you’ve learned in the process of writing your first novel, that you wish you knew at the beginning?
Be patient. The process takes a long time. Don’t rush. Find a great editor/editors, and trust her/them.
Which authors have been instrumental to your own reading and writing?
My first loves were my parents’ books from their childhoods: A.A. Milne in my dad’s precious editions from the 1940s; Enid Blyton from Mum. As a teenager, I read widely — I spent a lot of time in the school and public libraries — but developed obsessions with authors who I’d focus in on at different times: science fiction writers (Arthur C. Clarke, Asimov, John Wyndham, Ray Bradbury); the murder mysteries of Agatha Christie (after an earlier diet of Trixie Belden, Nancy Drew, Famous Five, Secret Seven et al.); an assorted bunch of American writers (J.D. Salinger, Paul Zindel, Sylvia Plath, John Steinbeck, Richard Brautigan); the short stories of Katherine Mansfield.
By the time — years later, in my late twenties — I was starting to try to work out how I might write, I was reading and inspired by Helen Garner, Beverley Farmer, Brenda Walker, Elizabeth Jolley, Peter Carey, Tim Winton; Patrick White, too. I was in love with Australian writing. I was in love with women writers: Virginia Woolf, Jeanette Winterson, Angela Carter, A.S. Byatt. I somehow didn’t discover Alice Munro and Carol Shields until I lived in Canada — they joined my pantheon. Men got a look-in too: Martin Amis, Ian McEwan, Julian Barnes, Jim Crace. Moving to New Zealand in the mid-90s, I was struck most by the poetry that runs through this country’s literature (poetry and prose) — Elizabeth Smither, Jenny Bornholdt, Bill Manhire, Sarah Quigley, Fiona Kidman, Damien Wilkins, Ian Wedde.
This is a very white, very anglo list, I know. But the writers who have influenced me most have been overwhelmingly white, writing in English from the mid- to late-twentieth century onwards.
My reading (I’ve resisted the silly urge to qualify and diminish this with ‘for pleasure’; all of my fiction reading is for pleasure) always circles back to one early obsession: murder mysteries and thrillers. I return again and again to Ian Rankin, Val McDermid, Peter Temple (a recent discovery), Ruth Rendell, P.D. James, John Le Carré, Henning Mankell; I find strange comfort in reading and re-reading Lee Child’s Jack Reacher novels. One of my early, unfinished novel MS is a murder mystery; I still fancy writing one, one day.
Your central character, Lena, lives into her 80s. How do you see yourself when you reach this age?
I look to my grandmothers. I was thinking a lot about them when I wrote this novel, and I dedicated it to them. At eighty, both of them were feisty, active, interesting, stroppy, interested, full of life and opinions. I hope I’m the same. I see myself as a kick-arse crone.
For more about Tracy Farr, or her debut novel, visit her website.
Each month I choose a debut author to profile from Friday Night Fictions. Read interviews with Michael Adams and Nina Smith. Next up is Laura Jean McKay, writer of the short story collection, Holiday in Cambodia — from the November soiree.
January 17, 2016
I received an ARC from Gallic Books through NetGalley.
When we first meet Lena Gaunt, she is a lonely octogenarian who has been invited to play her theremin at a music festival near her home in Perth, Australia. Lena has had a long and interesting life and her most notable accomplishment has been as an innovative musician. After her performance on her theremin, a odd looking electric instrument that one plays by manipulating one’s hands in the air without touching it, she relaxes in her trailer by smoking some heroin. At first this seems funny that a woman her age is engaging in such extracurricular activities; but as we learn more about Lena’s life, we come to understand that her dependence on mind altering drugs helps numb the pain of the devastating losses she has experienced.
Lena is actually born in Singapore in 1910 where her father is a successful and wealthy businessman. When Lena is only four-years-old she is shipped off to Australia to attend a boarding school. This is the first experience of lost love that Lena experiences. She is alone at this school, far away from any family and her only comfort is her music. Her mother’s brother, Uncle Valentine, drops in on her every once in a while and it is Uncle Val that eventually introduces her to the cello. Music becomes, for Lena, an escape, a comfort; it soothes her and gives her something on which to focus.
When Lena is a young adult she finally settles in Sydney among a group of artists and their patrons. It is during this period where she is introduced to a professor who has invented the theremin and her expert playing and manipulation of this innovate instrument are what launches her into the spotlight. It is also during this time that Lena meets the love of her life, Beatrix, who is a talented painter and artist in her own right.
Lena has a full life during which she is showered with accolades and acknowledgement for her musical talent. But despite her success, a feeling of loss and loneliness pervade her life. She moves around the world, from Paris to London to New York City, but in the end she finds her way back to Perth and to the beach and ocean which she loves so much.
This seems, at first, like a quiet and slow book but about half way through it grabs you and sneaks up on you until you can’t put it down because you so desparately want to know what happens to Lena and those she loves. I will admit that I had to wipe a tear or two from my eyes after finishing her story.
Gallic Books has brought us another brilliant, character centered story that I highly recommend. They were one of my favorite publishers last year and their winning streak continues with me. Kudos to Tracy Farr for a successful first book that is being published not only in her native Australia, but in England and the United States as well.
When we first meet Lena Gaunt, she is a lonely octogenarian who has been invited to play her theremin at a music festival near her home in Perth, Australia. Lena has had a long and interesting life and her most notable accomplishment has been as an innovative musician. After her performance on her theremin, a odd looking electric instrument that one plays by manipulating one’s hands in the air without touching it, she relaxes in her trailer by smoking some heroin. At first this seems funny that a woman her age is engaging in such extracurricular activities; but as we learn more about Lena’s life, we come to understand that her dependence on mind altering drugs helps numb the pain of the devastating losses she has experienced.
Lena is actually born in Singapore in 1910 where her father is a successful and wealthy businessman. When Lena is only four-years-old she is shipped off to Australia to attend a boarding school. This is the first experience of lost love that Lena experiences. She is alone at this school, far away from any family and her only comfort is her music. Her mother’s brother, Uncle Valentine, drops in on her every once in a while and it is Uncle Val that eventually introduces her to the cello. Music becomes, for Lena, an escape, a comfort; it soothes her and gives her something on which to focus.
When Lena is a young adult she finally settles in Sydney among a group of artists and their patrons. It is during this period where she is introduced to a professor who has invented the theremin and her expert playing and manipulation of this innovate instrument are what launches her into the spotlight. It is also during this time that Lena meets the love of her life, Beatrix, who is a talented painter and artist in her own right.
Lena has a full life during which she is showered with accolades and acknowledgement for her musical talent. But despite her success, a feeling of loss and loneliness pervade her life. She moves around the world, from Paris to London to New York City, but in the end she finds her way back to Perth and to the beach and ocean which she loves so much.
This seems, at first, like a quiet and slow book but about half way through it grabs you and sneaks up on you until you can’t put it down because you so desparately want to know what happens to Lena and those she loves. I will admit that I had to wipe a tear or two from my eyes after finishing her story.
Gallic Books has brought us another brilliant, character centered story that I highly recommend. They were one of my favorite publishers last year and their winning streak continues with me. Kudos to Tracy Farr for a successful first book that is being published not only in her native Australia, but in England and the United States as well.
January 10, 2016
I received an ARC from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.
This book is written in the style of a memoir, although it is completely fictional, and I found myself on many occasion "feeling" as though Lena was a real person and this was a true story. This is the kind of story that gets into your bones and stays with you long after you have finished the book.
I am surprised at how much I really enjoyed this book, as this isn't something that I would normally be drawn to, but Farr drew me right in and I was instantly captivated by Lena's life. Although I could figure out what was going to happen (especially with Trix and Grace), it didn't stop me from devouring the pages and enjoying every second.
I would highly recommend this story, especially if you are looking for something a little bit different.
This book is written in the style of a memoir, although it is completely fictional, and I found myself on many occasion "feeling" as though Lena was a real person and this was a true story. This is the kind of story that gets into your bones and stays with you long after you have finished the book.
I am surprised at how much I really enjoyed this book, as this isn't something that I would normally be drawn to, but Farr drew me right in and I was instantly captivated by Lena's life. Although I could figure out what was going to happen (especially with Trix and Grace), it didn't stop me from devouring the pages and enjoying every second.
I would highly recommend this story, especially if you are looking for something a little bit different.
October 7, 2013
I won this book as a Goodreads giveaway. This is Tracy Farr's first novel, and I have not read any of her short stories, but I thought this was a breathtaking book. I certainly knew nothing about the theramin before I read this novel, but Ms. Farr's gorgeous, haunting, and musical descriptions made me feel as if I could actually hear Lena playing. I confirmed Ms. Farr's descriptions were spot on when I looked up the theramin on YouTube. I have read many novels that have made me see the writer's words, but it takes a very special novelist to translate words on a page into music.
October 3, 2013
The fabulous book is a sensory treat. Read it slowly and savour it.
April 14, 2017
The Life and Loves of Lena Gaunt (Fremantle Press 2013), the debut novel by Tracy Farr, is an incredibly detailed and exhaustive fictional biography that charts the course of the invention and rise to popularity of the original electronic musical instrument, the theremin, and its champion, Dame Lena Gaunt. The novel is set in two distinct times, and moves between them easily. It opens in 1991 with octogenarian Lena living a quiet life of isolation in Cottesloe Beach in Western Australia, with only her occasional heroin use and the memories of a lifetime for company. A filmmaker, Mo, wants to make a documentary of her life, and over the course of the book, Lena recalls her childhood and early life, her training as a musician, and as the title suggests, her loves. Threaded throughout these passages is a firsthand account of that life, moving from tropical Malacca and distant parents, to a lonely boarding school existence from the age of four in Perth, to Sydney and her affair with the artist Beatrix Carmichael, to fame and society life in European cities. Her love for music joins everything together, first the cello, and then the theremin, the only musical instrument played without touch or breath, but rather by the electrical impulses of the body, and forerunner to the techno-music of today. Lena's star shines brightly at the height of her musical career, and it flares again momentarily at the beginning of the novel when she is invited to participate in an outdoor music festival (where she attracts the notice of Mo). But her life has been full of loss, and recounting her loves only serves to highlight that loss. Reading this book, it is difficult to believe it is fiction - the character of Lena seems so fully formed, so authentic, and her travels and aspirations and achievements and lovers so real, that she truly comes alive from the pages. The places she lived, the experiences she lived through - including wars and the Depression - seem to be an account from a diary rather than a novel. Farr is deliberately vague about some aspects of Lena's life (the ever-present benevolent Uncle Valentine, for instance, is the one constant figure in her life, and yet we do not learn much about the intricacies of his life; and so it is with other relationships important to Lena - the snatches of detail we catch form an incomplete picture), and this is somewhat of a distraction as we are left to wonder about the hows and whys of some of the story's major plot points. Once we accept, however, that we are not going to be told everything, and that there are some parts of the narrative that will be left to our imagination, it is easy to go with the flow of the book and immerse ourselves in what we know, while imagining all we don't. All in all, the research this narrative entailed, the many details of time and place, along with the rich embroidering of the characters' lives, make for a fascinating story.
April 5, 2021
You'll already know the plot by getting down to the reviews, so I'll forego repeating what the up-front blurb provides.
So. What a ride. I found myself tempted to dig through Wikipedia on more than one occasion to look up characters from this novel because it read so very much like an actual biography.
Truth be told, I found it a bit difficult to get into the feel for the book. I suspect that's my fault, and not author Farr's. Once I'd connected with Gaunt (20 pages in?) the rest of the book was a joy to read, sometimes painful in stretches.
A good tool for this novel was the dual narrative, with the documentarian hoping to tell Lena's story; the story progresses smoothly through this seemingly insignificant add. Nice touch.
Four stars.
Thanks to the publisher and NetGalley for providing me a free advance reading copy of this book. This in no way influenced by review or rating.
So. What a ride. I found myself tempted to dig through Wikipedia on more than one occasion to look up characters from this novel because it read so very much like an actual biography.
Truth be told, I found it a bit difficult to get into the feel for the book. I suspect that's my fault, and not author Farr's. Once I'd connected with Gaunt (20 pages in?) the rest of the book was a joy to read, sometimes painful in stretches.
A good tool for this novel was the dual narrative, with the documentarian hoping to tell Lena's story; the story progresses smoothly through this seemingly insignificant add. Nice touch.
Four stars.
Thanks to the publisher and NetGalley for providing me a free advance reading copy of this book. This in no way influenced by review or rating.
January 2, 2016
To be honest, the first few pages didn’t grab me and I began to wonder what I was going to be able to say, especially when I was introduced to the ‘Theramin’, one of the first electric musical instruments, invented by Leon Theramin, a Russian, in 1920. Yes, this instrument actually existed and full details can be found on Google. There is even a link to You Tube and film of Theramin playing the instrument. Once I understood what was being written about I found myself drawn into the story and the beguiling character of Lena.
This book is about the sometimes difficult and always eventful life of Lena Gaunt, who is taken as a baby to Malaya by her parents, and who after a near tragedy in 1914, at the age of four, is sent to Boarding School in Australia under the wing of her Uncle Valentine. Lena has a gift for music and starts at school with the piano, then moving to what will be her first love, the cello.
Lena is indulged by her Uncle whose lifestyle is ‘arty’ and Avant garde. It is a time of smoking (for one’s health!), casual drug taking, homosexuality and life lived in the fast lane. Whilst it is never openly stated, the assumption is that Valentine is a homosexual.
When Lena’s Mother dies, she and Uncle Valentine travel to Malaya where her father expects her to take up the reins and housekeep for him. She is also encouraged to play her cello for guests. But Lena feels trapped and unhappy, and takes to solitary walks at night until she unwittingly enters an exotic men’s club where she encounters Uncle Valentine and her father’s business partner. Lena is sent back to Australia in disgrace for having ruined her father’s reputation, and so begins her adult life.
The story is about relationships, with music, with instruments, with art and with people, mostly in that heady period between the wars. I found myself with full visual images of the characters and the lives they inhabit; I could see Lena, Valentine and the other characters as clearly as I see my friends. Thus the book wormed its way into my affections and I couldn’t put it down.
Farr writes with great confidence and I would recommend this to anyone who enjoys something a bit different. It gets under your skin, and even having finished the book and moved on to another, I find myself drawn back to Lena and her life.
Pashtpaws
Breakaway Reviewers were given a copy of the book to review.
This book is about the sometimes difficult and always eventful life of Lena Gaunt, who is taken as a baby to Malaya by her parents, and who after a near tragedy in 1914, at the age of four, is sent to Boarding School in Australia under the wing of her Uncle Valentine. Lena has a gift for music and starts at school with the piano, then moving to what will be her first love, the cello.
Lena is indulged by her Uncle whose lifestyle is ‘arty’ and Avant garde. It is a time of smoking (for one’s health!), casual drug taking, homosexuality and life lived in the fast lane. Whilst it is never openly stated, the assumption is that Valentine is a homosexual.
When Lena’s Mother dies, she and Uncle Valentine travel to Malaya where her father expects her to take up the reins and housekeep for him. She is also encouraged to play her cello for guests. But Lena feels trapped and unhappy, and takes to solitary walks at night until she unwittingly enters an exotic men’s club where she encounters Uncle Valentine and her father’s business partner. Lena is sent back to Australia in disgrace for having ruined her father’s reputation, and so begins her adult life.
The story is about relationships, with music, with instruments, with art and with people, mostly in that heady period between the wars. I found myself with full visual images of the characters and the lives they inhabit; I could see Lena, Valentine and the other characters as clearly as I see my friends. Thus the book wormed its way into my affections and I couldn’t put it down.
Farr writes with great confidence and I would recommend this to anyone who enjoys something a bit different. It gets under your skin, and even having finished the book and moved on to another, I find myself drawn back to Lena and her life.
Pashtpaws
Breakaway Reviewers were given a copy of the book to review.
December 14, 2015
A potent story of passion, love and loss mixed with stunning prose. Tracy Farr’s stunning mesmerizing language will captivate your attention. Clearly an author telling a story masterfully, her words a tactile experience. Her description of the theremin is outstanding, you visualize as well as hear the instrument at the hands of Lena. She delves headfirst emotionally into Lena leaving you spent.
Lena Gaunt a woman of quiet strength, you understand her pain as she reflects on her past. A bohemian, fearless, goes with the wind until the unfairness of life strikes. Compartmentalization, her strength lessening, she’s a woman exhausted, tired of living stoically, self-medicating fails to sooth her prolonged agony. Farr knits a profound emotional connection with this protagonist, she’s dimensional and every emotion and feeling hidden resurfaces with extreme visibility.
The narrative was centered around music and art which I enjoyed. I’m not a fan of split narratives but in this instance it was done wonderfully. The premise of filming Lena emphasized her losses and heartbreak to both Lena and the reader, opening the proverbial Pandora’s box.
Between Farr’s marvelous writing and the in-depth sketch of Lena, this is one moving story, a story penetrating your heart and senses, memorable evocative and intense. Impressive debut from Farr, her originality, historical references marrying with fiction form a enthralling contemporary read.
Lena Gaunt a woman of quiet strength, you understand her pain as she reflects on her past. A bohemian, fearless, goes with the wind until the unfairness of life strikes. Compartmentalization, her strength lessening, she’s a woman exhausted, tired of living stoically, self-medicating fails to sooth her prolonged agony. Farr knits a profound emotional connection with this protagonist, she’s dimensional and every emotion and feeling hidden resurfaces with extreme visibility.
The narrative was centered around music and art which I enjoyed. I’m not a fan of split narratives but in this instance it was done wonderfully. The premise of filming Lena emphasized her losses and heartbreak to both Lena and the reader, opening the proverbial Pandora’s box.
Between Farr’s marvelous writing and the in-depth sketch of Lena, this is one moving story, a story penetrating your heart and senses, memorable evocative and intense. Impressive debut from Farr, her originality, historical references marrying with fiction form a enthralling contemporary read.
March 28, 2015
A most interesting book especially for me as I grew up in the late 50's and 60's in John Street, Cottesloe. The writing and setting description were beautiful and true. It was a sometimes sad, quiet and artistic walk through different times and countries. As the story progressed it pulls the reader into a strange and in some ways old fashioned world. Yet these are bohemians. The lives described do not fit the usual stereotypes. I found Lena an interesting and complex character. The supporting characters, were a fascinating and odd bunch. I especially "recognised" the Cottesloe couple, Cath and Eric, who remind me of the many unusual people I remember growing up in Cottesloe, with its boarding houses and oddballs, long before it was gentrified. The language and tone sounded very authentic to me. The musical descriptions made me wish I knew more about music.
November 2, 2015
What a thing of beauty this novel is, especially impressive for a debut. Fictional account of a life characterized by music and sadness that's sure to move even a heart of stone. Life long enough, public enough becomes in its own way a part of history and a lens to witness history through. In this particular case it was interesting to read about pre, during and post war Sydney. The narrative, though, is the real star here, and Farr, much like an eponymous expert thereminist herself, does a terrific job of manipulating emotions from a distance of a page. Lovely book. Highly recommended.
September 27, 2013
I really enjoyed this book. Tracy Farr truly has a gift with words; I was amazed by how easily I glided through the book. Beautifully written - the imagery that Farr managed to create made me think at times that I was there. I was surprised when I could almost smell the scenes!
October 1, 2018
Cross-posted from Nightjar's Jar of Books.
In her youth, Lena Gaunt was at the forefront of electronic music's wave of popularity. Now in her eighties, she is approached by a filmmaker, who wishes to make a documentary about her, and so finds herself looking back over her life, and the people - and instruments - that shaped it.
I was primarily drawn to this book because, on the surface at least, the main character seemed a lot like my sister - a cellist, and a theremin player, whose name is Helen(a) - which amused me, but thankfully the similarities end there. The Life & Loves of Lena Gaunt is a great novel, but Lena's life isn't the most cheerful...
The story spans eighty years, and switches back and forth between Lena's present-day encounters with the filmmaker Mo, and her memories of her earlier years; her childhood in Singapore and Perth, and later her time travelling wherever her loves (both human and other) led her. Both of these storylines were heartfelt and compelling, and although it could at times seem a little directionless, I found myself really appreciating the meandering, introspective tone of Lena's narration.
I also appreciated how much Lena's love was directed towards music, and how much that love of music influenced her life. Many of the significant moments in her life were, of course, affected by the people she most cared for (most notably, her Uncle Valentine and her lover Beatrix, among others), but just as important were her two instruments, the cello and the theremin. Lena was an incredibly vivid, realistic character, and I had to remind myself a few times while I was reading that this is a fictional autobiography.
This definitely isn't my usual literary fare, but I'm glad to have read it nonetheless, and am sure that Lena's journey will be sticking with me for a while. I'm interested, too, in checking out more of Farr's writing, which also doesn't look like what I'd usually gravitate towards, but will hopefully surprise me as pleasantly as this one did.
January 28, 2021
This was a fantastic read - a wonderful look at life through the 20th century for a young woman starting out as an innocent 18 year old stepping into the world of music and fame and the bohemian style of life often followed by the hangers on in that world. It takes us through the heady days of success into the world of forbidden love and beyond and into the ways of motherhood, love, loss and intense grief, finally ending in the only way it should. The story takes the reader on a journey of discovery and into the world where all that mattered was the music and even that failed her in the end.
The characters in this book are deep and well thought out. The reader meets a range of people from very diverse backgrounds and embraces the wonderful richness and depth they all bring to the story.
I very definitely encourage you to pick this book up and dive, literally, into the world of Lena Gaunt!
This is a Goodreads First Read
The characters in this book are deep and well thought out. The reader meets a range of people from very diverse backgrounds and embraces the wonderful richness and depth they all bring to the story.
I very definitely encourage you to pick this book up and dive, literally, into the world of Lena Gaunt!
This is a Goodreads First Read
June 27, 2025
I enjoyed this fictional story of Lena Gaunt as she recounts her life. The book begins at the end of her life and is told alternately from her past and present--1991. Lena was among other things an accomplished theremin player. I knew what a theremin was (a unique electronic musical instrument played without physical contact) from watching Sheldon play one on The Big Bang Theory! Lena grew up at a private boarding school, saw little of her parents, traveled and lived in several places, played the cello, and had love in her life as well as great loss. The more of this book that I read, the more I liked it.
July 14, 2016
"The theremin is an early electronic musical instrument controlled without physical contact by the thereminist. It is named after the Westernized name of its Russian inventor, Léon Theremin, who patented the device in 1928. Wikipedia"
I cannot believe this book has not been read by more people. It was so beautifully written with a unique historical fiction storyline. Set predominately in Perth and New Zealand from 1927-1991, Helena (Lena) Gaunt is eighty years old. Maureen (Mo) Patterson, a documentarian filmmaker, is making a film about Lena's life. The book unfolds between current and past time.
Lena was born in Singapore and was a cello prodigy. Her parents send her to boarding school and she lives with her Uncle Valentine the majority of her life. She meets. Professor who has invented the theremin. They called the instrument a aetherphone, "this most magnificent instrument of my invention, played without touching, played by drawing the hands through the aether, by the modern science of physics and the human body combined." Lena grasps the unique instrument and goes on to become famous for her compositions.
On her eighteenth birthday she performs for an audience of aristocrats where she meets Beateix (Trix) Carmichael who becomes her lover and partner. Trix is twice as old as Lena. Trix is a painter. They dabble in opium, jazz, and a bohemian lifestyle. Trix is offered a position to teach in New Zealand where they live until she dies from cancer.
Lena is devastated by Trix's death, but she is pregnant with their daughter, Grace, when Trix dies. Grace is a gentle, magical, curious child who provides Lena a life raft to survive her grief. They move to Perth to be near Uncle Val. She is reacquainted with Gus, a friend and musician from her past life with Grix. They are together until a tragedy strikes again taking Grace and Lena's life shatters.
Lena moves to New York City where she focuses her career on the aetherphone and forgetting about her past. She is asocial and uses opium to lessen her pain and attachment to her life.
This was a hauntingly sad story of Lena's life. Farr wove the story so well around the making of the film and Lena thinking about the ocean, Trix painting, the sensations she felt when playing the theremin, her maternal love for Grace, and the immense loss felt by Lena upon the deaths of Trix and Grace. Definitely an author to watch.
"When I first saw Beatrix, for a moment I did not know whether she was a man or a woman. Beatrix seemed beyond gender; and so she was."
"There is an extent to which it is just easier to return to one’s homeland. If I can call on a musical analogy, maybe it’s like the motif of an orchestral piece – you come back to it; it flows through the music, anchors it, no matter how far the music wanders from it. It comes back to that motif. It centres around it. Its heart is there. I guess this place is somehow at my centre. It’s where I refer to – it’s my reference point. My life has been lived relative to this place. And so, while I’ve flung myself far away from it many times, I return to it as if I’m on elastic."
"I prepare my sweet smoke – just enough, and then some more. There is comfort – in the end, as always – in repetition, in ritual. My hands make movements that my conscious mind does not have to control, automatic, nerves firing electrical impulses, skin and bone and flesh responding. My gear is on the table by my side. I do not have to be careful any more. I am patient. Aetherised. I am acutely conscious of the sounds I am making. Even the smoke has sound. I cannot move my body from this chair. But the smoke can take me anywhere. Blue smoke, ti-tree, the scent of oranges, turpentine and tea; sweet boronia, rosin, rosewood, on a wave of salt ocean air. I hold the smoke in my lungs, in my body, sweet and bitter connected. My feet are flat on the floor, rest bare on the silkwarm pile of the rug. My hands rest on my knees. My fingertips tap a rhythm, pattern the blood and drug flowing through my body. Why do they call this wasted? This beauty. This stillness. This escape."
"As I pluck the final note, I let myself sink under the water. Expelling air from my mouth and nose, as the bubbles rise to the surface above my head I hear waveforms, harmonic intervals; I can hear the soundwaves mixing in the air and water, undulating, soothing. I will myself to be as heavy as I feel; I feel myself within the water, feel myself displace it, feel my body move through the water and make it eddy and roil, feel bubbles rise in my wake and turbulence all around. Trix is there; Grace is there. Grace is there, above me, her dark hair around her head like a halo, like a dinner plate, like a sea anemone’s tentacles, like a star. Grace holds her arms out towards me, then rolls in the water above me and faces away, her hair tentacling around her, blocking out the sun, the sky, the world, the air above. I wave my hand at Grace, wave at her to turn back, not to go away, but she does not respond. I stop waving. The water is warm. It makes a pressure against my ears, a pressure I can hear inside my head as a single note, humming, musical, low. It is B-flat, like the black strip near the bottom of the piano. But it isn’t played on the piano, it’s a different sound, not a hammer on a wire, nor a bow across a string, nor an electrical field interrupted; it is a humming, inside my head, but low; lower than any note I have heard before. It is the lowest note in the universe; a grace note, a ghost note, the low hum of everything, connecting."
I cannot believe this book has not been read by more people. It was so beautifully written with a unique historical fiction storyline. Set predominately in Perth and New Zealand from 1927-1991, Helena (Lena) Gaunt is eighty years old. Maureen (Mo) Patterson, a documentarian filmmaker, is making a film about Lena's life. The book unfolds between current and past time.
Lena was born in Singapore and was a cello prodigy. Her parents send her to boarding school and she lives with her Uncle Valentine the majority of her life. She meets. Professor who has invented the theremin. They called the instrument a aetherphone, "this most magnificent instrument of my invention, played without touching, played by drawing the hands through the aether, by the modern science of physics and the human body combined." Lena grasps the unique instrument and goes on to become famous for her compositions.
On her eighteenth birthday she performs for an audience of aristocrats where she meets Beateix (Trix) Carmichael who becomes her lover and partner. Trix is twice as old as Lena. Trix is a painter. They dabble in opium, jazz, and a bohemian lifestyle. Trix is offered a position to teach in New Zealand where they live until she dies from cancer.
Lena is devastated by Trix's death, but she is pregnant with their daughter, Grace, when Trix dies. Grace is a gentle, magical, curious child who provides Lena a life raft to survive her grief. They move to Perth to be near Uncle Val. She is reacquainted with Gus, a friend and musician from her past life with Grix. They are together until a tragedy strikes again taking Grace and Lena's life shatters.
Lena moves to New York City where she focuses her career on the aetherphone and forgetting about her past. She is asocial and uses opium to lessen her pain and attachment to her life.
This was a hauntingly sad story of Lena's life. Farr wove the story so well around the making of the film and Lena thinking about the ocean, Trix painting, the sensations she felt when playing the theremin, her maternal love for Grace, and the immense loss felt by Lena upon the deaths of Trix and Grace. Definitely an author to watch.
"When I first saw Beatrix, for a moment I did not know whether she was a man or a woman. Beatrix seemed beyond gender; and so she was."
"There is an extent to which it is just easier to return to one’s homeland. If I can call on a musical analogy, maybe it’s like the motif of an orchestral piece – you come back to it; it flows through the music, anchors it, no matter how far the music wanders from it. It comes back to that motif. It centres around it. Its heart is there. I guess this place is somehow at my centre. It’s where I refer to – it’s my reference point. My life has been lived relative to this place. And so, while I’ve flung myself far away from it many times, I return to it as if I’m on elastic."
"I prepare my sweet smoke – just enough, and then some more. There is comfort – in the end, as always – in repetition, in ritual. My hands make movements that my conscious mind does not have to control, automatic, nerves firing electrical impulses, skin and bone and flesh responding. My gear is on the table by my side. I do not have to be careful any more. I am patient. Aetherised. I am acutely conscious of the sounds I am making. Even the smoke has sound. I cannot move my body from this chair. But the smoke can take me anywhere. Blue smoke, ti-tree, the scent of oranges, turpentine and tea; sweet boronia, rosin, rosewood, on a wave of salt ocean air. I hold the smoke in my lungs, in my body, sweet and bitter connected. My feet are flat on the floor, rest bare on the silkwarm pile of the rug. My hands rest on my knees. My fingertips tap a rhythm, pattern the blood and drug flowing through my body. Why do they call this wasted? This beauty. This stillness. This escape."
"As I pluck the final note, I let myself sink under the water. Expelling air from my mouth and nose, as the bubbles rise to the surface above my head I hear waveforms, harmonic intervals; I can hear the soundwaves mixing in the air and water, undulating, soothing. I will myself to be as heavy as I feel; I feel myself within the water, feel myself displace it, feel my body move through the water and make it eddy and roil, feel bubbles rise in my wake and turbulence all around. Trix is there; Grace is there. Grace is there, above me, her dark hair around her head like a halo, like a dinner plate, like a sea anemone’s tentacles, like a star. Grace holds her arms out towards me, then rolls in the water above me and faces away, her hair tentacling around her, blocking out the sun, the sky, the world, the air above. I wave my hand at Grace, wave at her to turn back, not to go away, but she does not respond. I stop waving. The water is warm. It makes a pressure against my ears, a pressure I can hear inside my head as a single note, humming, musical, low. It is B-flat, like the black strip near the bottom of the piano. But it isn’t played on the piano, it’s a different sound, not a hammer on a wire, nor a bow across a string, nor an electrical field interrupted; it is a humming, inside my head, but low; lower than any note I have heard before. It is the lowest note in the universe; a grace note, a ghost note, the low hum of everything, connecting."
April 7, 2018
intriguing, I think I thought that this would be linked in with Russia somehow (Lena..) but it took place in NZ, Oz, Paris, Cornwall. Loved it, hope I am like this when I'm 80 (without the heroin habit). Twice, something pivotal happens and no explanation is given as to why or how. It piqued my interest rather than annoying me because I needed to know. The facts just rest there, without embellishment and it made me smile that the author decided to do that to us, the readers! And yes, I did look up the musical interest straight away!
November 10, 2017
A good read about a life well spent and a beautifully wrought description of playing the theramin which seems to be undergoing a revival at present. The protagonist is conveniently without the need to ever work or wed, and is ostensibly writing this book as her own biography while resisting the efforts of others to film or story her life. Nice that it’s set on cottesloe, WA.
October 15, 2017
This is just so beautifully written, but I am still a bit devastated that not even a smidge of it is a true story, I was hoping for historical fiction but no it’s just plain fiction, unless I’m wrong and someone who has done some better research can correct me?
September 30, 2018
Loved the history of my home town Perth. Great writing, I enjoyed learning Lena's story. I actually had to google her but found out she is fictitious, although the theremin is real! I had to reread parts of the book to understand some important events! Great choice book club.
October 29, 2016
Really enjoyed this book - wonderful writing style and I became completely immersed with the characters
April 1, 2019
A bundle of missed opportunities, but a good, fast read.
March 22, 2017
i received this book via netgalley in exchange for an honest review
What an unusual but lovely book charting the life of well lived
you almost believed this was a true story emotional atmospheric I highly recommend
What an unusual but lovely book charting the life of well lived
you almost believed this was a true story emotional atmospheric I highly recommend
January 5, 2016
The Life and Loves of Lena Gaunt, by Tracy Farr, is the fictional memoir of an octogenarian musician who has lived through two world wars and across four continents. It is a stunning example of writing that touches the soul, beautiful and haunting in its resonance. The understated emotion which simmers beneath the surface is all the more powerful for being recounted in modulated, demure textures and tones.
Lena Gaunt is an only child, born to wealthy, Australian parents in 1910 Singapore. She is shipped off to board at a school near Perth when only four years old, a beloved uncle helping to make her time there more bearable, that and her love of music. At her school, where she remained until she was sixteen, she learned to play piano and then cello. She eschewed friendship for her art at which she excelled.
By the time her father recalled her to the family home this had been relocated to Malaya. Lena soon grew bored with the refined and proper life she was expected to live. When her father discovered how she secretly coped with her boredom he raged at the potential shame and banished her.
Lena moved to Sydney where she met other artists and their patrons, including a professor who had invented a new type of musical instrument, the theremin. Lena fell in love with this avant-garde device, playing it at private parties, small gatherings and then at larger venues as her skill and fame grew. Her early success was, however, short lived. She moved to New Zealand with her lover, and then back to Australia where she saw out the years of the Second World War.
In the fifties there was renewed interest in her theremin playing and she traveled between Europe and America, not returning to Australia until she was in her sixties. After a twenty year hiatus she was invited to perform at a festival close to her home. In the audience was a film maker who approached her with a view to making a documentary of her life. Despite her reservations Lena agreed and it is this process around which her memoir, this story, is written.
The prose mirrors the character of the protagonist; it is, after all, written in her voice. Lena is self contained, fluid and refined, but with a simmering passion and internal disregard for convention. She requires privacy and space in which to live beyond the petty constraints imposed by:
“the workaday world with its morals and strictures, its curtain twitching and mouth pursing”
Although her colourful exploits are recounted in this tale it is the feeling and effect rather than the detail that lingers. There are smooth cadences, soaring crescendos, necessary recovery, all wrapped up around a life lived:
“out of sight of conservative eyes and minds of grey people”
There is triumph and tragedy, her experiences described as sounds:
“the sounds around me, reflected, refracted. These sounds had depth behind them and raw salt rubbed through them”
The only jarring note in this symphony of a life was Trix who came across as brash beside Lena’s outward finesse. Perhaps it was Trix’s term of endearment for Lena, the condescending ‘doll’, which particularly grated on my contemporary ears. Lena’s potential seemed diminished while with Trix, although the former may have considered this a price worth paying.
Despite the chain smoking, heavy drinking and casual drug use, the stench of degeneracy is avoided. Lena relishes the plaudits her talent brings but shows little concern for the expectations of others when in private. She finds beauty in the shore and in the power of her chosen art. Her ability to accept hardship as part and parcel of a life lived makes this an uplifting read despite the pathos.
The writing is as close to a beautiful piece of music as I have encountered. I drank in the words, was moved to rapture and tears, and felt sated. I could listen in my heart again and again. Read this book and be filled.
My copy of this book was provided gratis by the publisher, Aardvark Bureau.
Lena Gaunt is an only child, born to wealthy, Australian parents in 1910 Singapore. She is shipped off to board at a school near Perth when only four years old, a beloved uncle helping to make her time there more bearable, that and her love of music. At her school, where she remained until she was sixteen, she learned to play piano and then cello. She eschewed friendship for her art at which she excelled.
By the time her father recalled her to the family home this had been relocated to Malaya. Lena soon grew bored with the refined and proper life she was expected to live. When her father discovered how she secretly coped with her boredom he raged at the potential shame and banished her.
Lena moved to Sydney where she met other artists and their patrons, including a professor who had invented a new type of musical instrument, the theremin. Lena fell in love with this avant-garde device, playing it at private parties, small gatherings and then at larger venues as her skill and fame grew. Her early success was, however, short lived. She moved to New Zealand with her lover, and then back to Australia where she saw out the years of the Second World War.
In the fifties there was renewed interest in her theremin playing and she traveled between Europe and America, not returning to Australia until she was in her sixties. After a twenty year hiatus she was invited to perform at a festival close to her home. In the audience was a film maker who approached her with a view to making a documentary of her life. Despite her reservations Lena agreed and it is this process around which her memoir, this story, is written.
The prose mirrors the character of the protagonist; it is, after all, written in her voice. Lena is self contained, fluid and refined, but with a simmering passion and internal disregard for convention. She requires privacy and space in which to live beyond the petty constraints imposed by:
“the workaday world with its morals and strictures, its curtain twitching and mouth pursing”
Although her colourful exploits are recounted in this tale it is the feeling and effect rather than the detail that lingers. There are smooth cadences, soaring crescendos, necessary recovery, all wrapped up around a life lived:
“out of sight of conservative eyes and minds of grey people”
There is triumph and tragedy, her experiences described as sounds:
“the sounds around me, reflected, refracted. These sounds had depth behind them and raw salt rubbed through them”
The only jarring note in this symphony of a life was Trix who came across as brash beside Lena’s outward finesse. Perhaps it was Trix’s term of endearment for Lena, the condescending ‘doll’, which particularly grated on my contemporary ears. Lena’s potential seemed diminished while with Trix, although the former may have considered this a price worth paying.
Despite the chain smoking, heavy drinking and casual drug use, the stench of degeneracy is avoided. Lena relishes the plaudits her talent brings but shows little concern for the expectations of others when in private. She finds beauty in the shore and in the power of her chosen art. Her ability to accept hardship as part and parcel of a life lived makes this an uplifting read despite the pathos.
The writing is as close to a beautiful piece of music as I have encountered. I drank in the words, was moved to rapture and tears, and felt sated. I could listen in my heart again and again. Read this book and be filled.
My copy of this book was provided gratis by the publisher, Aardvark Bureau.
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